Former Agency on Aging director reduces damages sought

Judge sets May 22 as trial date for suit over her dismissal

By Joe Beck -- jbeck@nvdaily.com

FRONT ROYAL -- The former director of the Shenandoah Area Agency on Aging filed an amended complaint Tuesday in Circuit Court that sharply reduced the amount of damages she is asking for in a lawsuit against the agency.

The amended complaint, submitted by attorney Robert J. Zelnick of Woodbridge on behalf of Helen Cockrell, asks for $20,000 in damages, plus interest from Sept. 9 instead of the $150,000 contained in the original complaint.

In a related matter, Judge Dennis L. Hupp set a May 22 bench trial for the case in a hearing conducted just before Zelnick filed the amended complaint.

The agency terminated Cockrell and two other top executives on Sept. 8 following the discovery a few weeks earlier of almost $265,000 in unmailed checks to vendors.

Ann T. McIntyre, one of the other dismissed agency officials, also has filed a lawsuit asking for more than $2 million damages, claiming agency officials defamed her by serving as sources for newspaper stories about her dismissal. McIntyre has argued that she was dismissed over policies governing use of credit cards and not for conduct related to financial mismanagement or improprieties, contrary to what she says was implied in stories appearing in The Northern Virginia Daily and the Winchester Star.

Since the dismissals of Cockrell, McIntyre and Jim Shaffer, the agency's finance director, the agency has been wracked with cash flow problems. At one point, employees voluntarily agreed to start paying for a portion of their health insurance premiums to help stabilize the agency's finances. The state's Department for the Aging also had to provide an emergency cash infusion after the agency missed its payroll for one week in September.

More recently, legal bills from Cockrell's lawsuit, along with other legal expenses and bills from auditors investigating the agency's finances, have been accumulating at a rate that have threatened to far exceed the $100,000 budgeted for them in the agency's 2012 budget.

Cockrell's amended complaint makes no mention of a major argument contained in the original complaint she filed in late October. At that time, she insisted that her three-year employment contract, which was signed Nov. 20, 2009, could be terminated for three reasons, none of which applied to the reasons given in a letter notifying her that the board of directors had fired her.

The contract set her salary at $100,000 a year.

The amended complaint still cites the agency for breaching the employment contract, but shifts its focus to a claim that the agency damaged her "by failing to pay her the accrued annual leave and sick leave she had earned during the course of her employment."

Phone messages left for the agency's attorneys, William E. Shmidheister III and Andrew S. Baugher of Harrisonburg, were not returned.